We have offered free accounts to small nonprofits and schools/universities from the very beginning of Kerika’s existence, but this was always on an ad hoc basis: someone would occasionally ask us for a free account for their school or nonprofit team, and we would agree.

Looking back, we found that we agreed to almost 99% of all the requests that ever came to us: the only situations where we turned someone down were

When we couldn’t figure out what the nonprofit was doing, or even whether it really existed. (Having a domain for your school/nonprofit really helps, even if it is not in English.)

When the school was for-profit, (We dodn’t see why we should subsidize for-profit organizations.)

When the organization was essentially a governmental entity that was getting funded through public money in a normal way.

With these caveats aside, we have tried to be very generous and helpful for small organizations that are doing philanthropic work, or are schools.

But our old process for dealing with these requests was really haphazard, and when we implemented our new billing system and improved account management features, we also made it easier for us to grant nonprofit status to a much larger group of organizations, providing they are small teams.

Our new process makes everything much easier for schools and nonprofits: we are whitelisting entire domainsso that everyone from that domain who signs up automatically gets a free Academic & Nonprofit Account.

This means that only person ever needs to make a request on behalf of a school or university: if that gets approved, we will approve it for everyone from that school/university.

With a free Academic/Nonprofit Account you can have up to 10 people working on boards owned by that account: it doesn’t matter how many boards you have, or how big these boards are.

If you need more than 10 people, you will need to sign up for a Professional Account, which is $7 per user, per month (normally billed annually, as $84 per user).

Here’s a partial list of schools and universities we have already whitelisted for free service:

We have a complete (one-hour long) video of the tutorial presented by Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, at the recent Lean Transformation Conference on the subject of Kanban vs Scrum: what’s the difference, and which should you use?

A fun video we made recently featuring Faith Trimble and Kate King, from the Athena Group, talking about how a consulting company can function as a truly distributed team — and get great work-life balance as a result!

We don’t offer this as a regular service — because it involves some special back-end work that can be a little time-consuming — but we recently helped a bunch of users migrate their accounts over from Kerika+Google to the new version of Kerika that lets you sign up directly with us, and have Kerika store your files instead of linking Kerika to a Box or Google account.

This is the version that you sign up for when you click on the left side of our Sign Up page:

Signing up directly with Kerika

With this option, Kerika stores your files for you using our new integration with the Box Platform.

Migrating away from Kerika+Google to this new platform helps our users save money: they could discontinue their use of premium (paid) Google Apps which they had adopted only to use as a sign-up mechanism for Kerika.

Handling this migration isn’t something we do for everyone, but this is one of our oldest customers. 🙂

This conference is all about Lean and Agile in the public sector: thousands of folks from state, county and local (city) government agencies will be attending, and as usual Kerika will also have a display booth on the 5th floor of the Tacoma Convention Center.

Arun’s topic this year is “Can You See It Now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows”.

We look forward to seeing our Washington users at the conference; please do stop by our booth or sign up for Arun’s talk!

We have added a new feature that should prove handy for a lot of folks: you can now add content — files from your laptop, images from your mobile or tablet, Web links from your Intranet or the Internet, or canvases — to a Task Board or Scrum Board itself.

If this sounds like something that was always there, maybe we need to say that differently: you used to have the ability to add content to a card, now you can add it to the board itself.

There are many situations we have encountered where we want to share content or a canvas with a team, but there wasn’t any obvious place to still it — no single card on the board that seemed like the right place to attach that content.

And that’s because the content we wanted to add was applicable across the entire board, not just relevant to a single card.

This was getting frustrating, so we decided to scratch our itch: a new button on the top-right area of your Kerika app will let you add files, Web links and canvases to the board itself:

Many of our users work in globally dispersed teams; our own team is spread out between Seattle and India.

With multiple timezones, particularly when they are widely spaced apart, commitments like “I will get this done today” become a little tricky to understand.

If someone in India says “I will get this done today”, is that India time or Seattle time? Well, that depends upon where you are, when you log into Kerika.

Kerika automatically factors in differences in timezones when showing due dates: someone who commits to getting something done “today” in India is actually committing to get it done by 11:30AM Pacific Standard Time, now that the US is in Daylight Savings Mode.

So, the due date is shown in a way that’s relevant to the user’s local time: our Seattle folks see an Indian’s commitment like this

Local time due date

These timezone differences automatically adjust for Daylight Savings Time: there’s nothing you need to do to see when a commitment is actually due.

Except, perhaps, notice that the item is now overdue, as indicated in red in the example above…